Results for Penerley Lawyers:
Penerley Commercial Lawyers in Islington, London:
For as long as we can remember (and after working in the industry for over 20+ years now we can remember a lot) most people have always sought a specialist for things like Motor Offences, Debt Collection and Immigration. More recently though the number of people starting up their own small business or being self-employed has risen dramatically.
There's therefore been quite a surge in the number and type of legal service provider popping up to meet the demand. We've been trying to find some of these specialists to add to our network and seeking those that seem to have a better grip on what type of legal professional today's modern business-person is after.
It's sad but true that many of the 'well-established' law firms that go around quoting they've been solicitors for over 200 years, are genuinely acting as old as they state. Only five years ago one lawyer said to us 'that internet? no we don't do that' when we asked about their online offerings. Even today there are dozens of law firms that don't even have a website, let alone an online tracking system for people to check on their case progress.
The quote above is from the website of a Commercial Law specialist called Penerley, based in Islington. 'Less-stuffy' is a phrase we're seeing pop up more and more in newer firm's sales pitches about their services. The idea being that most people have an image in their head when the term 'solicitor' is mentioned. They naturally want to point out - that's not them. But so far we've not seen anything too extreme such as beanbag chairs in the conference room. Although there is one firm that has a ban on their employees wearing suits.
One thing to watch out for when flicking through business services is that some of them are actually very far away from being a law firm. By that we mean some don't even have a single solicitor on staff. You don't actually have to be a qualified solicitor to sell someone some employee contract templates or provide advice on setting up your small business. Even helping you register as a limited company is not the sole discretion of lawyers.
To check whether someone is a qualified solicitor or that a firm has one on staff, you can always use your local law society website. The Law Society of England & Wales has a great user-side display of information and the majority of legal professionals will register with their national, county and sometimes even city law society.
We're now at a stage on the web where people typically have access to online reviews about everything from toasters to plumbers to local courts. Unfortunately this has not really spread to law firms as much as everywhere else. Whilst people are very happy to talk about their local hairdresser online - they are not so eager to discuss their divorce, bankruptcy or probate litigation.
Penerleys only had three online reviews that we saw after digging through Google, Yell, Yelp and Trustpilot. There were all positive, but none of the reviews had left any useful comments. We really don't advise relying on any individual ratings about a company without accompanying explained reasons. This is because some people's complaints can be ridiculously petty, and some can be attached to the totally wrong firm. (We once had a negative comment because we helped lawyers and the person hated lawyers.)
They do have some testimonials on their website:
"able to quickly understand the issues at hand and provide clear and detailed advice"
"our first point of call on most legal questions"
On that note, a quick point about navigation. The branding is very unique so no difficulties getting the correct website to pop up in the search results with varied types of related query such as 'penerleys lawyers' or 'penerly solicitor'. The official site we link to above is www.penerley.co.uk and www.penerley.com redirects you there as well. The most common typos we'd expect would be www.penerleys.co.uk, www.penerly.co.uk or the dot com versions and currently none of those are owned by anyone.
Their site is https secure for submitting your personal details on their contact form. Also the majority of scams facing solicitors right now relate to conveyancing and property matters. Obviously with huge amounts of money changing hands, fraudsters are desperately emailing people pretending to be their solicitor and telling them to pay the money into the fraudster's bank account instead. For some reason, thousands of people have easily fallen for this. Never discuss bank details via email with anyone.
Penerley do have slightly longer opening hours than some firms and we saw one website listing them as having a half day Saturday open too. But at the moment, Google is listing their hours as closed all weekend. Obviously during lockdown though everything is a bit haywire. If they do open later and at least some weekends, that's a bigger deal than you might think. As mentioned before many law firms are stuck in the past and the 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri is still the industry norm.
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General Notes: Legal Aid availability changes constantly, so ask up front. If you are looking for a career with Penerley Lawyers it's best to visit the website (www.penerley.co.uk) and locate the correct phone/email contact details. Any quoted here will be for potential clients. Alternating or adding words such as Penerley Solicitors may bring up different background/reviews on the firm. Each firm's Law Society and/or SRA number should be on their site too.